The medium Henry Slade was caught in fraud many times throughout his career. In a séance in 1876 in London Ray Lankester and Bryan Donkin snatched his slate before the "spirit" message was supposed to be written, and found the writing already there.[75] Slade also played an accordion with one hand under the table and claimed spirits would play it. The magician Chung Ling Soo revealed how Slade had performed the trick.[76]

Channeling is a method of trying to communicate with the spirit world that has existed since antiquity. Most modern channelers learn the art through the practice of Eastern meditation. This mildly altered state of consciousness enables the channeler to psychically perceive spirit messages. These manifest themselves as a “thought voice,” which is perceived in the stillness of the medium’s mind. Experienced mediums can enter into a trance state whereby the spirit entity takes direct control over the medium's voice, speaking through it in an accent quite distinct from the medium's normal mode of speech.

The word tarot and German Tarock derive from the Italian tarocchi, the origin of which is uncertain but taroch was used as a synonym for foolishness in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.[2][3] The decks were known exclusively as trionfi during the fifteenth century. The new name first appeared in Brescia around 1502 as tarocho.[4] During the 16th century, a new game played with a standard deck but sharing a very similar name (trionfa) was quickly becoming popular. This coincided with the older game being renamed tarocchi.[1] In modern Italian, the singular term is tarocco, which, as a noun, means a type of blood orange, and, as an adjective, means 'fake, counterfeit'.
In March 1902 in Berlin, police officers interrupted a séance of the German apport medium Frau Anna Rothe. Her hands were grabbed and she was wrestled to the ground. A female police assistant physically examined Rothe and discovered 157 flowers as well as oranges and lemons hidden in her petticoat. She was arrested and charged with fraud.[102] Another apport medium Hilda Lewis known as the "flower medium" confessed to fraud.[103]
Scientists who study anomalistic psychology consider mediumship to be the result of fraud and psychological factors. Research from psychology for over a hundred years suggests that where there is not fraud, mediumship and Spiritualist practices can be explained by hypnotism, magical thinking and suggestion.[41][42] Trance mediumship, which according to Spiritualists is caused by discarnate spirits speaking through the medium, can be explained by dissociative identity disorder.[43]
In 1918, Joseph Jastrow wrote about the tricks of Eusapia Palladino who was an expert at freeing her hands and feet from the control in the séance room.[118] In the séance room Palladino would move curtains from a distance by releasing a jet of air from a rubber bulb that she had in her hand.[119] According to the psychical researcher Harry Price "Her tricks were usually childish: long hairs attached to small objects in order to produce 'telekinetic movements'; the gradual substitution of one hand for two when being controlled by sitters; the production of 'phenomena' with a foot which had been surreptitiously removed from its shoe and so on."[120]
The Major Arcana is a 22 card set within the tarot that is considered to be the core and the foundation for the deck. All of the deck is filled with archetypal significance, but this is most pronounced within the Major Arcana. These cards follow a storyline that tells of the spiritual travels taken from the innocent wonder of The Fool to the oneness and fulfillment of The World. In other words, these cards tell the story of humanity's spiritual evolution into enlightenment and individuation.
The séance trick of the Eddy Brothers was revealed by the magician Chung Ling Soo in 1898. The brothers utilized a fake hand made of lead, and with their hands free from control would play musical instruments and move objects in the séance room.[96] The physiologist Ivor Lloyd Tuckett examined a case of spirit photography that W. T. Stead had claimed was genuine. Stead visited a photographer who had produced a photograph of him with deceased soldier known as "Piet Botha". Stead claimed that the photographer could not have come across any information about Piet Botha, however, Tuckett discovered that an article in 1899 had been published on Pietrus Botha in a weekly magazine with a portrait and personal details.[97]
As occult interest in the Tarot expanded, it became more associated with the Kabbalah and the secrets of hermetic mysticism. By the end of the Victorian era, occultism and spiritualism had become popular pastimes for bored upper class families. It wasn’t uncommon to attend a house party and find a séance taking place, or someone reading palms or tea leaves in the corner.
The biblical basis of this practice is St. Paul's advice to his disciple Timothy whom he appointed bishop. St. Paul told him to "Attend to reading." The word "attend" an allusion to the many other concerns that a bishop has to attend to. By this, according to St. Alphonsus Liguori, Doctor of the Church on Moral theology, the Apostle Paul "wished him to apply to the reading of holy books, not in a passing way and for a short time, but regularly and for a considerable time."
One of the hours of the Divine Office/Liturgy of the Hours has spiritual reading and prayer rolled into one: the Office of Readings. It begins with the praying of three psalms/canticles from Scripture, and it concludes with one Scripture reading and one reading from the Church’s tradition. It could be from a saint’s writings, an ecclesial document, a selection from one of the Church Fathers, or a sermon from one of the great preachers in our tradition. You might not have otherwise picked up St. John Chrystostum’s homilies on Our Lady, a portion of Lumen Gentium, or a selection from St. Therese’s Story of a Soul! Praying the Office of Readings provides a healthy dose of Scripture and offers short introductions to 2,000 years of spiritual heritage.
By comparing various decks from different time periods, tarot-card enthusiasts can identify the evolution of certain illustrations. “For example,” says Matthews, “the modern version of the hermit with the lantern, you’ll find that that was an hourglass and he was Saturn or Chronos, the keeper of time. You can see how that translates with the Tarot Bolognese meaning of delay or blockage. It was about time moving slowly, though that’s not used as a modern meaning much now.”
The James Van Praagh School of Mystical Arts is here to empower and awaken you. Founded by New York Times bestselling author and internationally acclaimed spiritual teacher James Van Praagh, the James Van Praagh School of Mystical Arts offers a variety of innovative online courses and spiritual trainings that allow you to create your most fulfilling life, live your soul’s purpose, and share your gifts with the world. The school also offers one of the most in-depth and well-regarded psychic and mediumship certification programs available today. Ultimately, the James Van Praagh School of Mystical Arts is more than a learning experience. It’s a place of like-minded souls where you’re empowered to shine

The Empress. The Hanged Man. The Chariot. Judgment. With their centuries-old iconography blending a mix of ancient symbols, religious allegories, and historic events, tarot cards can seem purposefully opaque. To outsiders and skeptics, occult practices like card reading have little relevance in our modern world. But a closer look at these miniature masterpieces reveals that the power of these cards isn’t endowed from some mystical source—it comes from the ability of their small, static images to illuminate our most complex dilemmas and desires.

Building on Court de Gébelin’s Egyptian connection, Etteilla claimed that tarot cards originated with the legendary Book of Thoth, which supposedly belonged to the Egyptian god of wisdom. According to Etteilla, the book was engraved by Thoth’s priests into gold plates, providing the imagery for the first tarot deck. Drawing on these theories, Etteilla published his own deck in 1789—one of the first designed explicitly as a divination tool and eventually referred to as the Egyptian tarot.

These trump, or triumph, cards were often painted for wealthy families. Members of the nobility would commission artists to create for them their own set of cards, featuring family members and friends as the triumph cards. A number of sets, some of which still exist today, were created for the Visconti family of Milan, which counted several dukes and barons among its numbers.

The beauty of the wealth of knowledge available to us is there is often a book for whatever need we may have. If we encounter questions about the faith, we have resources to develop our intellectual knowledge. The Catholic blogosphere has a myriad of “Catholic mom” sites where women mutually support each other in their vocations as wives and mothers. There are books too numerous to list that have come from Catholic authors on parenting and authentic masculinity and femininity.
The British medium William Roy earned over £50,000 from his séance sitters. He confessed to fraud in 1958 revealing the microphone and trick-apparatus that he had used.[166] The automatic writings of the Irish medium Geraldine Cummins were analyzed by psychical researchers in the 1960s and they revealed that she worked as a cataloguer at the National Library of Ireland and took information from various books that would appear in her automatic writings about ancient history.[167]
Every spiritual lesson we meet in our lives can be found in the seventy-eight Tarot cards. And when we consult the Tarot, we’ll get shown the exact lessons we need to learn and master to live an inspired life. It’s like holding up a mirror to yourself so that you can access your subconscious mind. Tarot allows us to tap into the wisdom and answers that live in us all.
Through Guided Imagery, Meditation, Theta and Delta wave pattern healing, and Spiritual Guidance, I assist souls to awareness of where these energetic cyclical patterns origination is and how to transform it within this dimension and within all of their life experiences in all dimensions, so that one can remember, embrace, and treasure the all inclusive inner wisdom of our soul and of our Soul Life Purpose for this Life Experience clearing the pathway to the love and light you are.
If you are looking for guidance about your life, such as career, relationships, spiritual growth, etc., then you are requesting a psychic reading. I will connect with you “energetically”, by working with your aura, which contains information about you, your past, your present and your future. It is my spirit in my body connecting with your spirit in your body. You may receive guidance “psychically” that will help you to make some decisions in your life. My intention is to bring awareness where needed, and provide you with the best and highest guidance to help you move forward from current obstacles in your life. You will always have free will to make choices based upon what guidance you are receiving. Nothing is ever “set in stone”.
You don't have to be a professional medium to sense the presence of Spirit, anyone can get this ability. And there are two types of onset - one onset later in life, and one early on. Think: like Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. One has to do more with heredity and genetics (we think), and the other has more to do more with certain weatherings of life experience that make you more susceptible to it.
Four, some psychic mediums get feelings or sensations in their body and mind, both physical and emotional. A spirit can make the psychic medium feel sad if they are trying to convey the message of depression. Or they can make the psychic medium’s lungs feel tight if they are trying to convey the message that someone had pneumonia or lung cancer. It is not uncommon that a psychic medium will feel a painful sensation in the head if the spirit is trying to relay the message that there was a head trauma that caused death. This could be due to an auto accident or suicide (or any number of causes), so the spirit will also send another message—perhaps a telepathic picture of a smashed car—to complete the story for the psychic medium.
You may find it helpful know that what you are experiencing is fairly common, and you aren't alone. Lots of people from all over the political, religious, age, class, race, industry spectrum have pulled me aside to talk about this. (So relax, alright?) It's just something no one wants to discuss because they're afraid everyone will think they're crazy. It's a terrible isolation loop, really. But moving on . . .

The game’s original instructions said it could be used for divining because the illustration on each card included both a symbolic image, like the anchor, and a specific playing card, like the nine of spades. “Hechtel must have seen that there were overlaps between divining with playing cards, which, of course, everyone did, and his game,” says Matthews. “Many other oracle decks appeared around the same time at the end of the 18th century and into the early 19th century. They became really popular after the Napoleonic Wars when everyone settled down and became terribly bourgeois.

St. John Paul II opens up Fides et Ratio extolling the complementarity of faith and reason; they are “like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.”[v] Every Catholic isn’t expected to get an advanced degree in theology, but each one of us has to understand what we believe. St. Peter reminds us to “always be prepared to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15).
The James Van Praagh School of Mystical Arts is here to empower and awaken you. Founded by New York Times bestselling author and internationally acclaimed spiritual teacher James Van Praagh, the James Van Praagh School of Mystical Arts offers a variety of innovative online courses and spiritual trainings that allow you to create your most fulfilling life, live your soul’s purpose, and share your gifts with the world. The school also offers one of the most in-depth and well-regarded psychic and mediumship certification programs available today. Ultimately, the James Van Praagh School of Mystical Arts is more than a learning experience. It’s a place of like-minded souls where you’re empowered to shine

In English-speaking countries, where these games are not played, tarot cards are used primarily for divinatory purposes, usually using specially designed packs.[1] The cards are traced by some occult writers to ancient Egypt or the Kabbalah but there is no documented evidence of such origins or of the usage of tarot for divination before the 18th century.[1]

Many souls have written or called me to ask, is an email reading effective? Is it as effective as say a phone or in person reading? What about healings, can they work via email or phone as well? As I have explained to many souls, an email reading is what we would call here on this earth dimension as just as effective and in some cases more so than the phone or a soul to soul physical presence reading. This is simply because in a phone reading or in-person reading, most of what is said we hear but we may be free from remembering every word spoken so that it resonates within us. While it is the energy of the reading rather than the words themselves that provide us with the shift within the soul, there are moments when we forget what is said and there are moments we come infinitely back to a Spiritual Medium or search for another reader to gift us what it is we have forgotten.
I have read several book about mediumship, and currently reading surviving Death, Leslie Kean. I also have read time and again the skeptics crow every time they believe they have exposed fraud. The prance and buck at every attempt to make genuine controlled experiments, such as the Swartz experiments. They will never ever be convinced not ever, because for them the brain is the beginning and the end. Hell will freeze over before these critics would ever be anything other than convinced its all smoke, mirror, frauds and deceptions. Wikipedia-Not a good source for a complete treatment or fair treatment of any subject has several long and lengthy treatises discrediting anything suggestive of survival after the brain is dead.

The Christian spiritual life is a journey that doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Christianity requires a community to exist in and teachers from whom to learn the faith, and features a cloud of witnesses cheering us on (Heb 12:1). The Holy Spirit animates the Church and, among other things, gives her the gifts of knowledge, wisdom, understanding, fortitude, good counsel, and fear of the Lord, piety. We have an obligation to build on those gifts sealed in us at our confirmation: and one of the most effective ways is spiritual reading. By reading good spiritual books, we can build on each of those seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. In addition, we can come to know the saints better, sit at their feet, and learn from their writings.

And here’s the thing – you may already consciously know the message or insight you receive in a Tarot reading, in which case, the reading can be a heartening confirmation of what you already know. Or, you might be completely unaware of the message until you see it reflected in the cards, in which case you are now empowered to take action based on your new awareness.

Disclaimer: All sessions are for adults 18 years old or older. Any information presented in a session is not meant to replace any psychological, legal, medical, or other professional advice or services. The guidance and insight provided through my services is intended to help clients to make better life choices toward their own happiness and fulfillment, and that a client is always free to make their own choices at will, regardless of the interpretation of the information. Joanne Gerber shall not be liable regarding any action or non-action taken by the client in reference to the information presented during the session. Services are non-refundable.

Even the earliest known tarot decks weren’t designed with mysticism in mind; they were actually meant for playing a game similar to modern-day bridge. Wealthy families in Italy commissioned expensive, artist-made decks known as “carte da trionfi” or “cards of triumph.” These cards were marked with suits of cups, swords, coins, and polo sticks (eventually changed to staves or wands), and courts consisting of a king and two male underlings. Tarot cards later incorporated queens, trumps (the wild cards unique to tarot), and the Fool to this system, for a complete deck that usually totaled 78 cards. Today, the suit cards are commonly called the Minor Arcana, while trump cards are known as the Major Arcana.

Likewise, the entire audience can affect the clarity of the spirit communication at a psychic medium demonstration. If the audience as a whole is very open, accepting and light-hearted, this helps the psychic medium, as it would help any speaker on stage. If the audience as a whole is skeptical, apathetic or angry, this can negatively affect the psychic medium, as it might affect any speaker in front of such a group. Spirit communication is about energy. If the energy in the room is low, it makes it more difficult for the psychic medium to raise his or her energy to connect with spirit. If the energy is high, it can assist the psychic medium to raise his or her energy.

And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you.

I thought i would mention that all Psychic related abilities are GIFTS that some of us receive, not everyone who claims to be gifted is genuine and 100%. This could be because they're a fake or are not advance to a higher level there are different reasons for this. Genuine Psychics, Mediums, Clairvoyants etc are given the gift for a reason decided by The Spiritual Realms, these gifts and more are not of your own choice and most often you will notice such abilities at a very young age, for me it was when i was 13 years old some people notice earlier. We all know the golden rule which applies to those who have been fortunate enough to have been blessed which such an amazing gift or gifts the rule states "When you have a gift it is your duty to share it with the rest of the world." It is never about you it is never about making money or fame it is for the good of humanity.

At times, a spirit that hasn’t crossed over yet may linger as they have some sort of “unfinished business.” Sometimes, they linger in our homes, cars, or at work. If we sense them during your reading, we will clear them out of your home and help them on their journey by crossing them over or helping them release whatever they were holding onto. Almost all of our clients report a significant “light feeling” in the area where they felt was once dark and “spooky.”

The Danish medium Einer Nielsen was investigated by a committee from the Kristiania University in Norway, 1922 and discovered in a séance that his ectoplasm was fake.[130] In 1923 the Polish medium Jan Guzyk was exposed as a fraud in a series of séances in Sorbonne in Paris. Guzyk would use his elbows and legs to move objects around the room and touch the sitters. According to Max Dessoir the trick of Guzyk was to use his "foot for psychic touches and sounds".[131]
A very large part is played by fraud in spiritualistic practices, both in the physical and psychical, or automatic, phenomena, but especially in the former. The frequency with which mediums have been convicted of fraud has, indeed, induced many people to abandon the study of psychical research, judging the whole bulk of the phenomena to be fraudulently produced.[55]